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Mellon Seminar: Gendered Bodies, Scripted Bodies

September 27, 2013 - 4:00pm

Busch 18

Kirsten Cather

Associate Professor, Asian Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Professor Cather works on modern Japanese literature and film. Her first book, The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2012), analyzes Japan’s landmark obscenity trials of literature, film, and manga to consider the dynamic relationship between artistic and legal spheres. Her current book project, Scripting Suicide, looks at how suicide has been scripted in modern Japan through a variety of iconic representations that include suicide meisho (famous places) and memorials, as well as works by and about famous artists who committed suicide.

Michele Mason

Associate Professor of Japanese Cultural studies, University of Maryland, college park

Professor Mason’s research and teaching interests include modern Japanese literature and history, colonial and postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and masculinity studies. She also continues her engaged study of the history of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear studies, and peace and nuclear abolition movements. She is the co-editor of Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique (2012) and author of Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and Nation-State (2012). In 2010 she co-produced the short, award-winning documentary film, Witness to Hiroshima. (witnesstohiroshima.com)